<p>I'm in my first year now.
I haven't started any form of research yet, but I'll be starting one beginning my second year.
How can you become a good researcher (either independent or not) in the sciences?
Also, how can you make it easy to read primary sources, or to write one?
Currently, I feel really burdensome and stressful when I'm reading primary sources, and my reading speed is very slow. How am I going to ever write and publish one if I'm having difficulty properly reading and understanding one?
Please tell me what I could do to be expert in reading and writing primary sources.</p>
<p>I'm not an expert, but what i do is read the abstract and introduction first, which gives you the theory. Then I move onto the conclusion and see if there's anything in the paper that's worth exploring. If there's a separate discussion section, I'll read that next. Finally, I move into the results section. Lastly, if the experimental section closely matches what I'm doing, then I'll look at their methods, but if it's completely different, then I will skip that all together. I also spend a little more time on the paper if it's from a well-known group or has been cited a lot.</p>
<p>cherrybarry: Thanks for your post. But do great profs and researchers actually read primary sources like that? Also, how did they become expert in writing and publishing one?</p>
<p>lol i forgot to ask what kind of papers u are reading? i'm referring to journal articles...i'm not sure what other primary sources there are in the sciences. also, not every prof reads in the same way, so it's just up to you to decide what works best. one of the reasons why papers are structured into these sections is that it makes it easier for the reader to triage the material</p>
<p>The first thing I do when I read most papers in my field is to see how well the data is actually analyzed. It's always funny how often smarty-pants PhDs manage to totally ignore an insignificant variable or not dprobit their model to properly analyze it. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>I agree with the "read each section piece-by-piece" method, and I also like to focus particularly on the figures and what they are meant to show. I think that reading journal articles is a skill that develops as you read a large number of them; at the beginning of this year I found myself writing summaries to help me get through paper discussion-based classes, but this semester I am finding it easier to just read the papers without having to summarize them for myself.</p>
<p>My approach is similar to cherryberry's, although usually if I'm really unfamiliar with the field I skim the abstract really quickly and then read the intro, conclusions, discussions, and results. Then I finally return to the abstract. I find that reading the abstract first if I really know nothing about the field is usually unhelpful because it's typically super abbreviated so that it assumes a bunch of background knowledge on your part.</p>